JISC's Learning Registry Node Experiment at Mimas

Node Explorer

We now have a prototype of a tiny app you can use to explore things on our node. Our app is based on some work, called LR statistics, previously done by the LR developers in the U.S. If you wanted to, you could clone the app and adapt it to explore any LR node. The source code is available in our JLerN Github repository.

This version of the app runs on CouchDB in a cloud. (It literally took seconds to create a CouchDB instance, hosted by Iris Couch.) Once the prototype was ready, we replicated our resource data from the JLeRN Alpha node to the cloud and pushed the app there also. The app is just another JSON document stored in CouchDB.

Tonight the document count is 15955. This will not change if new documents are published to the JLeRN Alpha node. Having said that, live updates could probably be implemented but this would require further testing. [28 May: We have now implemented live updates. With respect to IE 8 & 9, the app works as expected but the status information might say the node is down when it is actually up. This has to do with your browser’s security settings. In your Internet Options, (1) allow “jlern.iriscouch.com” as a trusted site; (2) lower your security levels for that zone to Medium-Low; and (3) answer “yes” to the security question when you start the app. Or contact us.]

We could further develop the Node Explorer in any number of ways. Please do let us know what you think would be useful.

So Nick has now made it so that you can click on tags to see a list of resources with those tags (well, a JSON document listing the resources), and the neat thing is there are Resource Links in the JSON document to take you to the actual resources. But I’ve discovered you need a JSON viewer in your browser: I installed Firefox JSON View https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/jsonview/